Quick Thoughts 8/31

• Hey Dad, you can probably vote for this guy if you want.  I think he’s in your district.
• Free and legal music downloads?  Yeah, it sounds pretty good until you start reading all the catches.  You have to log into their website at least once a month, deal with the lousy WMA protected format, and you can’t burn the songs to a CD.  I don’t see this idea taking off.
• A window guy comes today to look at why my windows leaked last week.  I hope I don’t have to put up a fight to get them to fix the windows.
• Thank you Peter King.  Of course he also said that the Packers could go 9–7 as a best case scenario.
• Good news for gas prices.  I’ll believe it when I see it, but this article states that prices could be close to $2 a gallon by Thanksgiving. 

Bears Record Poll

Once again, I’m asking you to vote for your predictions on the Bears’ record this season. 

How many games will the Bears win this year?
	0-3
	4-7
	8-11
	12 or more
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Superfan Kahn's First Thoughts of the Season

There is a lot of stuff going on with the Bears right now, and not much of it is good.  Injuries are starting to add up, the defense looks vulnerable, and the offense, well, not much has changed there.  So far there haven’t been any significant season-ending injuries, but just a whole bunch of nagging minor injuries that have the potential to cause problems for the team throughout the season.  Mike Brown has tweaked his achilles tendon, and hasn’t played much.  Thomas Jones hurt his hamstring, and it’s supposed to be better, but he didn’t do much against the Cardinals to indicate that he is 100%.  Cedric Benson hurt his shoulder, and still isn’t playing with contact.  Those are some of the key injuries, but there are plenty of others as well, which have the potential to really be a problem for the Bears. 

Every year Bears fans hope like heck that the offense will improve, and won’t take years off of our lives from having to watch the ineptitude of the unit.  It really doesn’t look like this year is any different so far.  The first team offense has only scored six points (2 FGs) this preseason.  I read all sorts of hype about Rex Grossman, and how good he looks in practice, but I really haven’t been that impressed with what I’ve seen during the games.  I feel sorry for the guy really.  Injuries have put him in a near impossible situation.  Even though this is his fourth season, he has only played half a season’s worth of games.  He’s expected to be a savior, but he’s really still a rookie, experience wise.  As such, he’s going to make some mistakes, but fans aren’t willing to tolerate that.  I don’t agree with the booing he received during the game last week, but there is hope for this offense, and his name is Brian Griese.  I hope Griese never has to play this year, because that will mean Grossman is healthy and doing a decent job running the offense, but the odds are that Griese will get quite a bit of playing time this season based on history.  Griese is light years better than any backup QB the Bears have had in the past decade.  I finally feel good that the Bears have a legitimate insurance plan at the quarterback position.  (At least the Bears didn’t have to call up Jeff George again.)

What’s up with the defense?  I only watched the preseason game against the Chargers the other week, but the one thing that bothered me the most was all the missed and broken tackles.  What should have been no gain, or a loss, resulted in 20+ yards on more than one occasion, and that was with the first team defense on the field!  Last week, rookie QB Matt Leinart looked like Tom Brady against the Bears’ first team defense too.  For something that was supposed to be solid and not a cause of worry, I’m legitimately concerned about the defense right now. 

With all that said, we have to remember that the Bears play in the NFC North.  Watching the Packers last night against the Bengals, I feel a lot better about the Bears’ situation.  It’s a good thing the Bears play the Packers the first week of the season, and not a team like the Seahawks.  The Bears open the season at GB, against Detroit, and at Minnesota.  All of those teams have new coaching staffs, and hopefully won’t be fully clicking yet within their new schemes when the Bears play them.  Having a chance to start 3–0 in the division would be absolutely huge. 

Finally, here are some quick predictions for the Bears’ season:

• The Bears will finish 11–5 this season and once again win the NFC North.
• Brian Griese will end up starting at some point this season.
• The Bears will win at least one playoff game this season.
• Cedric Benson will be exposed as a bust.
• The Bears will sweep the Packers again, and make Brett Favre look bad in the process.  (But hey, he’s still having fun.  He loves to play football you know.)

Big storms last night

It was a crazy night for weather in the Rochester area last night.  We missed all of the big stuff earlier in the day, but at about 8PM, things started to get pretty wild.  We were watching the weather report, and there was a tornado spotted north of town.  They were getting golfball sized hail at the TV station on the north end of town.  Things were getting really dark out, but it looked like we were going to be south of the worst of the storm.  So, we decided to put Payton to bed.  About two minutes later, the rain started coming down in sheets and a west wind started whistling through the house.  We had all the windows closed and locked, but rain started coming in through the bottom of the windows on the west side of the house!  Right below the windows are vents, so the water went right down the vents and the gap around the vents, such that it started leaking from the ceiling in the kitchen and the basement.  I looked out the window at one point, and the wind was so strong that I gathered everyone up and went down the basement.  It looked like there was a hurricane going on outside.  By about 9PM most of the rain had stopped, and we scrambled to clean up all the water and get stuff drying right away.  The wind was intense, but I don’t think our windows should have leaked like that.  The previous owners had them installed in 2003 and 2004, so they are quite new.  I’m going to give the company that installed them a call. 

I was concerned about my apple trees in my back yard because they are loaded with apples and the ground was very soft.  One had blown over at about a 45 degree angle, so I tried to straighten it up the best I could.  It will survive, but I’ll need to give it some good support for a while.  A bunch of flower boxes had blown over on the deck, and even my grill, which was bungied to the deck rail, had blown over.  This must have been some serious wind, but I was thankful that my glass top patio table had remained on the ground.  Actually the weather report said there had been 75 MPH winds, which I don’t doubt.  Last night I also noticed that one of our maple trees had a big limb broken off, and it split down the trunk.  I figured that was wind damage as well, but upon inspection this morning, I believe that tree was struck by lightning! 

Fortunately, we didn’t get much hail, but the storms continued through the night.  Power flickered on and off for a while, and we lost our cable around midnight.  It was down for most of the night.  (I know this because I didn’t sleep very well.)  By morning, I had 3.5 inches of rain.  I bet we actually had more though, because when the wind was howling, I don’t think it was falling into the rain gauge. 

On my way to work this morning I didn’t pass too much damage.  There were lots of new lakes in the construction areas, and Willow Creek Golf Course was littered with downed tree branches, but that was the extent of it on my route.   

Quick Thoughts 8/18

• Da Bears have a nationally televised preseason game on CBS tonight against the Chargers.  I’ll be watching you Rex!
• Why do teams always change their uniforms from year to year now?  The new Vikings jerseys are pretty ugly in my opinion.  I’d be pretty upset if the Bears ever do much to change the look of their classic jerseys. 
• Apparently there is a common misconception in Iowa that muskmelons are melons grown in Muscatine, Iowa.  That certainly didn’t sound right to me, and after doing some very minimal research (thanks Google), I found that the muskmelon name has nothing to do with Muscatine, Iowa.  In fact, all cantaloupes are muskmelons, and they actually originated in Persia, which is not anywhere near Muscatine. 
• I will not be seeing Snakes on a Plane.

Quick Thoughts 8/10

• Softball season ended last night with a resounding THUD.  We played our worst game of the season when we needed to play our best.  The final was 11–1 in six innings.  Our one run came when a guy should have flied out, but the outfielder lost it in the lights.  It ended up bouncing off his forehead, and by the time the other outfielder got to it, our guy had made it home.  It’s pretty sad when we had only twenty batters last night, and that’s within eighteen outs.  Ouch.
• Have you ever heard anything by O.A.R. (Of a Revolution)?  I was recently introduced to their music, and am really into them right now.  They are a “jam band” that started at Ohio State in the late 90’s, and have a Dave Matthews Band, meets 311, meets Bare-naked Ladies sound to them.  I see they are playing in Iowa City and Minneapolis in late October.  Anyone want to go?
• Within another week or two “Superfan Kahn” will start showing up here again.
• See, even the fish get annoyed by jet-skiers.

Playoffs??

Softball season is winding down.  We had a make-up game on Sunday in the extreme heat, and managed to come away with a win.  They were a weaker team, and were only playing with nine guys, but we managed to make it much more interesting than it should have been.  The playoffs started last night.  We ended up with the fifth seed in our thirteen team league, and the top three teams got byes.  So we played the twelfth seed, and played down to their level.  We squeaked out an 11–10 win in eight innings.  There’s no way the game should have been that close, but we always seem to have problems in the playoffs. 

I actually drove in the winning run.  The bases were loaded and we had two outs.  I took the first pitch and it hit the mat for a strike.  In my previous at-bat, I also took the first pitch for a strike and then proceeded to foul the next pitch off for an out.  It had been years since I’d fouled out, and I wanted to make up for that.  So this time I hit it solid between the first and second basemen, allowing the winning run to score.  Unfortunately, I looked like Aramis Ramirez on the way to first (Cubs fans should know what I’m talking about), forgetting that I need to actually make it to first for the winning run to count.  The outfielder threw to first and fortunately, I made it there in time.  Boy that would have been a terrible, bone-headed move on my part if I had got thrown out for lack of hustle.  I would have been pretty mad at myself, and actually I am because that’s not the way I play.  I just got caught up in the moment and took my head out of the game for a minute.  Anyway, I ended up going 3–5 last night at the plate and got my season average back to .500 (25–50). 

Next week we play the fourth seed, who we lost to just last week by a score of 11–12.  The sad thing was that we had that game.  We were up 11–7 going into the bottom of the seventh, but gave up too many runs.  I can’t say we’ve been playing our best ball the past few weeks, and that’s not a good thing during the playoffs.  However, even as the fifth seed, we should be able to win the league.  We had a chance to win every game this year.  We finished 8–4 in the regular season, but the four losses were by a total of ten runs.  Our tendency has been to play to the level of our competition, which we’re going to need to do from here on out, because if we play sloppy, we’re not going to last very long.